


Calling Out a Name

by Woad



Category: Avengers (Comics), Iron Man (Comic), Marvel 616
Genre: Alls Well that Ends Well in Porn, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Bisexual Tony Stark, F/M, Identity Reveal, Kidnapped Tony Stark, M/M, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Past Relationship(s), Secret Identity, Temporary Character Death, Time Travel, Unicorns, What If? Vol 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-08
Updated: 2017-06-08
Packaged: 2018-11-11 10:57:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11147004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Woad/pseuds/Woad
Summary: He may have been marooned in King Arthur's time, lost his armor, and been cursed by a witch, but Tony's not giving up easily, even if it means learning a bit of magic.When he finds out that Iron Man has disappeared, Steve is just as determined in his pursuit to find and bring his friend back, even if he has no idea who it is beneath the armor.





	Calling Out a Name

**Author's Note:**

  * For [phoenixmetaphor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoenixmetaphor/gifts).
  * Inspired by [RBB Art - In the Meadow](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11007771) by [phoenixmetaphor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoenixmetaphor/pseuds/phoenixmetaphor). 



> For [phoenixmetaphor](http://phoenixmetaphor.tumblr.com/)'s wonderful RBB art! [Click here to see it on Tumblr.](http://phoenixmetaphor.tumblr.com/post/161601943077/art-for-the-cap-im-rbb-2017-the-fic-that-goes)
> 
>  **Warnings:** Please note the warning in the tags, there is a blink-and-you-miss-it major character temporary death. There is also descriptions of blood and use of knives.
> 
> A note on continuity: I'm no expert on Vol 1, and I've taken some liberties, smooshing Demon in a Bottle and Doomquest closer together for the sake of feels. At the point the story starts, Demon in the Bottle, Nights of Wundagore have taken place. Bethany Cabe and Steve still don't know about Tony/Iron Man's dual identities. Doomquest has just finished with Doom stranding Tony, as took place in What If? Vol 1 #33. I've opted to use the name "Morgana" for Morgan le Fey, as it appeared in Doomquest, and kept Tony's origin place in Vietnam.

“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”

**― T.H. White, The Once and Future King**

 

Bob Marley isn't my name. I don't even know my name yet.

**― Bob Marley**

 

 

  
****

Steve fiddled with the peeling black leather of his analog watch before pulling back the suit glove and looking down to check the time again. The face lit up in the darkness of the Avengers Mansion rooftop, a pale green glow illuminating hands at eight and ten _._ Iron Man should have shown over an hour ago.

If only he could have said that was unlike the man. There was a time when that would have been true, but no more. Not that Steve blamed the armored Avenger. No, in Steve’s mind, the new habit of tardiness lay square on Stark International’s shoulders. There were cracks running through the foundation of that company.

Ever since the Carnelian Ambassador had been murdered—seemingly by Iron Man himself, SI had been in and out of the headlines. Although Iron Man had been cleared of all charges at this point—all evidence pointed to a hijacking of the armor by Justin Hammer—with added scrutiny came more stories. Some were relatively innocuous: the gossip papers had been abuzz that Tony Stark was dating one of his own employees. Others were downright troubling. SI had recently been accused by an anonymous source of selling tech to a sanctioned state, and the whispers were, _Latveria_.

Steve didn’t know the full story, and so he reserved judgment. Tony Stark had welcomed Steve into his home with open arms, and he had always struck Steve as a good, if busy, man. Since SI was just coming off Hammer’s attempted frame-up of Iron Man, Tony and his company deserved, at very least, to be judged on the whole story.

Steve really hoped it would come out soon, though. From the increased demands on Iron Man, Steve guessed they were in crisis-control mode. And if Steve knew the man beneath the armor at all, he knew his old friend was probably letting his focus fall on SI’s troubles instead of seeing to his own. He’d voiced it in the past, worrying about the other employees and how a hit to SI would impact the foundations and institutions it funded. The Avengers, for example…

 _Hard not to ask_ —because even if it _was_ Steve’s place to pry about SI, Iron Man probably couldn’t say anything.

Not hard to see how guarding the Stark empire was catching up to the other man. He might have shoulders built of an iron alloy, but even the strongest of metals has a pressure point at which it buckles. Steve could hear Iron Man steadily creeping toward that inflection point. It was in the tired voice and the increasing frequency with which he asked Steve to repeat things. Iron Man’s head had never been completely in the Avengers fight—not with straddling work with SI—but between all the recent events, Steve worried it had reach the tipping point where his friend could no longer balance both jobs.

Unfortunately, trying to broach that topic was like striking a match inside an armory—one packed to the teeth with TNT.

Steve had tried. All it had resulted in was a shouting match, and he’d had to pull rank as the chairman, which still felt dirty. He didn’t have any choice, though. Taking a leave of absence was protocol for any Avenger after playing a role in a civilian death. No matter how much Steve reiterated that it wasn’t a question of guilt—or that he’d insisted on Iron Man’s innocence throughout the investigation into the Carnelian assassination—Iron Man hadn’t been able to see it as anything but rebuke. He’d been on forced leave, Iron Man insisted, while on the run to clear his name. In so many words, he was saying that he’d done his time.

Problem was, Steve’s stubbornness in grounding him was rooted in a wholly different reason. It was clear to Steve that whatever Iron Man had done when he went into hiding, it hadn’t been working through the feelings that came from being turned into an unwilling and unwitting murder weapon.

 _“I faced a lot of things while I was gone, and I did it without having to hold your hand, Cap,”_ Iron Man snarled back. _“Don’t presume you know what’s best for me.”_

He had no way to know how much that ripped at Steve’s heart. It wasn’t deliberately cruel, but that didn’t mean it hurt any less. He wanted to say, _I wish I had been._ He wanted to catch Iron Man’s red and gold glove, press it over his own heart, and will him to feel how much those words hurt. He wanted to say, _Tell me_.

He sensed it was far too late for that. Perhaps it would help from someone who wasn’t Steve. As much as he wanted to be that person, right now Iron Man needed someone firm to tell him to look after himself.

So Steve doubled down. “Rules are rules. Two weeks leave. Starting now.”

Two weeks had softened Iron Man, but it hadn’t been enough. To Steve, it was still obvious that he was running on empty. Still, there was only so far Steve could push the other man before he had to call a vote, and it wasn’t as if he really wanted to remove Iron Man from the team permanently.

The fluorescent green of the watch lit up again as Steve checked the watch one more time. Resigned that Iron Man wasn’t coming, he left the rooftop, heading downstairs.

At the foot of the main stairs, he found Jarvis polishing a candelabra.

“Any message from Iron Man this evening?”

Jarvis looked up at him as he twisted the cloth around the curves of silver and shook his head. “I’m afraid not. Were you expecting him, Captain?”

Steve thought of the note on the desk in his room, in Iron Man’s tidy, blocky script.

_Wanted to apologize properly. Dinner @ Martin’s 8pm? I can pick you up at 7. Meet me on the roof._

Steve frowned. Tardiness was one thing. But lack of communication was a different beast entirely. “Yes. Something must have come up.” Steve’s Avengers identicard lay mute in his pocket, which meant whatever had Iron Man’s hands full would be SI business. Steve told himself that if Iron Man hadn’t activated his ID, then the man could probably handle it by himself.

_Probably._

“Jarvis, Bethany Cabe, she’s Tony’s new head of security, right?”

“That’s my understanding.”

“Do you have a contact number for her?”

Jarvis set the candelabra back on the the entryway table and gave a curt little nod. “If Mr. Stark has kept everything up to date, I’ll have it for you momentarily.”

* * *

 

For a genius, Tony felt pretty stupid.

It wasn’t as if he had had much choice, though. Trapped in King Arthur’s time, joining forces--and tech--with Doom had been his only shot of getting back to the present. To Doom’s credit, the dictator had been remarkably civil as they gutted their armors and rigged up a makeshift time machine.

Granted, Tony had been distracted, thinking of how he would apologize to Steve for standing him up. Still, it was no excuse, and he really should have foreseen the betrayal. Doom’s parting taunt just salted the wound. “One last bit of advice,” Doom said, slipping into the ether of time. “Never bargain with an enemy--until you first wrest from him his word of honor.”

As if Doom’s word was worth anything more than mud.

Worst of all, perhaps, was that powering the time jump had left Tony’s armor drained. Weakened and running critically low on power, crawling out of Morgana’s crumbling castle was all Tony could manage. He desperately hoped he had enough of his solar panel array left to charge the suit for flight. Otherwise, it would be a long, lonely walk back to the civilized world. Morgana’s castle was deep in the heart of desolate lands, veiled in mist, and navigating that on foot would be a nightmare.

Well, he’d find out if his armor would start recharging soon enough. Not much farther to go; he could see the door. He focused on the here and now, pushing back at the panic threatening to overwhelm him—the cold voice in the back of his head asking how he would possibly find a way home now.

He might never get to make the dinner up to Steve…

 _One step at a time,_ he told himself, then repeated it as a mantra, determined to drown out the doubt.

“Your sorcery seems to have left you, knight,” a cold, cruel voice from behind Tony said.

Tony pushed himself up on his elbows, head swimming as if on the tail end of a bender--all the motion sickness, with none of the debauched revelry beforehand. Who knew an unprotected brush with a time vortex could addle the brains? He put it on his mental list of, _been there, done that, under no circumstances repeat_.

“Morgana,” Tony replied, trying not to wobble. It should have been easier than it was, seeing as how he was on hands and knees. “You appear to be see through. That can’t be healthy.”

He really hoped he wasn’t hallucinating her.

She examined one hand. “I suppose I am. Well, let the world know me as the Phantom Queen. I’ll be restored to what is rightfully mine soon enough, and when I do, the likes of you will never frighten me again. I learned a great deal about you while you worked, my armored sorcerer. Whatever power you had, you seem to have foolishly traded the bulk of it to my champion.”

Tony snorted. “Doom’s _some_ champion, turning tail after you disappear without so much as even looking for you. Kicking yourself yet for running away too soon?” He was still vaguely disappointed she’d banished herself to another realm beyond his reach. He’d hoped to hand her over to Arthur.

The ghostly woman crossed her arms and looked down her nose at Tony in a way that said she very much disagreed. “It seems that today even a worm may be right. He was unworthy to be my champion. It seems I am in need of another.”

Tony laughed at her.

In retrospect, he really shouldn’t have.

* * *

 

_“Maybe Stark snapped and pulled a Bobby Fischer. Or maybe the whole thing’s exactly what it looks like. This guy that SI fired recently, Zurrow, he wasn’t some small minnow in their sales department. You really think Stark was in the dark about the deals he was making?”_

_“Maybe he just made a point of not looking very hard.”_

Steve felt the couch shift and glanced up from the TV to see Bethany Cabe leaning over one of the back cushions with the remote in her hand, paying him no mind. She had been in and out of Avengers mansion over the last few days owing to Tony’s disappearance, and the initial shock of seeing Captain America watching the news in full uniform had apparently lost its novelty. With a _click,_ she muted the audio feed, but it did nothing for the the ticker of text parading across the bottom of the screen: _day 11 of Stark missing — Avengers chair Captain America statement: ransom note previously reported on was a hoax — longtime SI employee Jim Rhodes is now acting CEO —_

“Wish you’d waited to tell them about the hoax,” she said, voice dulled with the tones of sleep deprivation.

Steve did too, but hindsight was 20/20. “Any news from the G-Men?”

She shook her head. “Word from Iron Man yet?”

“Just radio silence.” That, more than anything, worried Steve, for all the reasons that it had the night on the roof, waiting for him to show. To Steve, it said that whoever, or whatever, was responsible for Tony’s disappearance, Iron Man was either with him, or worse…

“ _There’s_ a surprise,” the red head said, in a way that made it clear there was none.

Steve closed his eyes for a moment, trying to reign in his frustration, as he had had to since she’d spoken with him over the phone a little less than two weeks ago. She didn’t have much respect for Iron Man—that had been obvious to Steve from the start.

“Look,” he finally said, unfolding himself from the couch and facing her, “I don’t know what your problem with Iron Man is, if it’s a security rivalry or what. Frankly, it’s none of my business. But if we’re going to coordinate the search effectively between the Avengers and SI, I’d appreciate it if you kept the snide remarks about Iron Man to yourself.”

He thought he was drawing a line in the sand, not waving a red flag, but Steve saw her jaw set before he’d even finished speaking.

“There’s no rivalry. He’s a terrible body guard. He’s never there when Tony needs him most.”

That took Steve by surprise—a little bit too close to his own unvoiced fears. “Then why does Mr. Stark continue to employ him?”

“Good question,” she replied bitterly, staring at a picture of Zurrow floating on the screen. “I suspect he’s too busy trying to do right by everyone else. I doubt he sees the failure of others to do the same until it’s too late.”

In the far corner of the room, Jarvis cleared his throat. “Captain, Ms. Cabe? There’s a phone call on the secure line.”

Steve felt his heart leap and his stomach lurch all at once. The secure line meant a government office was calling. And if Jarvis was asking for them both, it could only mean news of Tony.

In the office upstairs, Steve sat behind the desk, picked up the red phone’s receiver, and pressed nine to put the call through.

“Hello, uh, Captain Rogers?” The voice on the other end was young. The man’s tone suggested he half-expected to be told _no,_ that his coworkers had set him up for an elaborate prank.

“Speaking.”

“Agent Morales, sir. We have a development in the search—or, more accurately, Iron Man’s whereabouts—and I’m afraid it’s bad news.”

Steve held his breath. _Please don’t let him be dead._ Whatever Bethany’s reservations about Iron Man, if Tony had been hurt, it would only be over Iron Man’s dead body.

“We have a scientist that defected from Latveria who’s seeking asylum. He claims to have activated a time machine while Iron Man and Doctor Doom were standing on it. I know it sounds far-fetched, but he has a surveillance tape…”

Steve let a breath out, not sure if the numbness that washed over him was relief or exhaustion. “It’s a time platform. Does he know when it was set to?”

“No. Only that it was set quite some time in the past.”

 _Damnit_. “Decidedly out of your jurisdiction then.”

“Just a bit,” the agent conceded, the dry humor falling flat on both of them. More soberly, he added, “Even if the machine weren’t in a hostile, sovereign state, the scientist says he destroyed it afterward, hoping it would prevent Doom from returning. And unfortunately, the security tape is too grainy to make out the settings. I’m afraid that even if we could retrieve it, we might never know where your friend was sent.”

Steve closed his eyes and mentally began cataloging anyone in their circle of allies that could manipulate time. It was depressingly short. “Any word of Mr. Stark from the scientist?”

“We asked, but he said Iron Man was the only other person he saw. Doesn’t rule it out, but we can’t confirm Mr. Stark’s presence from the intel we have. I know it isn’t much to go on…”

“It’s very helpful. Thank you, Agent Morales,” Steve said, and hung up.

He opened his eyes again to see Bethany with arms folded, staring down at him. She was going to be disappointed that the lead didn’t have any info on Tony. But at least it was something actionable—if they found Iron Man, Steve was optimistic that they’d get another lead on Tony’s whereabouts. “You going to lay the bad news on me, or make me guess?”

Steve just shook his head, and decided this feeling was fatigue after all. He dug his identicard out of his pocket, pondering how to divide up the team into ‘home’ and ‘away’ personnel for a rescue mission. “I don’t think even I could have guessed this one.”

* * *

 

“You’ve missed a spot,” Morgana said, her ghostly image floating past Tony, far too self-satisfied with watching his manual labor. He was on hands and knees, nails bleeding, scrubbing a courtyard’s flagstones of bird shit the good old fashioned way: with a bucket and a wiry brush. Unfortunately, no one had invented neoprene gloves yet. Every time he dipped the brush into the bucket of lye, his reddened hands burned like they’d been set on fire.

Just one more bit of him that hurt. The only good thing about the bruising on his back and around the ribs was that it proved he hadn’t given up without a fight.

“I guess you should have let me build that pressure washer after all,” he quipped—and promptly doubled up as an iron-alloy boot connected with his tender ribs. Tony had been stripped down to a tunic and ratty linen pants. Ostensibly it was clothing, but he felt naked without the armor.

What the self-styled Phantom Queen had done to the armor hurt far worse than anything she, or the lye, could do to Tony physically. He looked up at the shiny mask of the armor staring down soullessly at him: Morgana’s hijacked puppet of a taskmaster, and the reason Tony might need a kidney transplant—if he survived long enough to find a way back to a time with modern medicine.

By dent of magic—and _god_ did Tony hate magic, now more than anything else in the world—she had taken control of the red and gold suit, animating it as her own personal knight. She had had enough of champions with their own agendas, she’d said. The bewitched suit of armor would be far more reliable.

On some level, it was a relief that she didn’t want to brainwash, blackmail, or be-spell Tony into her champion, as he’d first feared she might. Not that that meant he was free to go. No, he had begun to suspect that she needed an assistant to work certain spells, spells that she could no longer cast in her limbo-like state of existence, holding on to a presence in the universe by the tips of her nails. She’d been confused as to why she couldn’t just bring herself back, so instead of kill him, she’d cursed Tony. His heart, she told him, would wither in his chest and stop beating if he set foot beyond the castle walls.

Of course, the flip-side to her interest in the armor was that it was an extension of Tony, and watching as it was manipulated by a madwoman recalled recent events that had only just begun to scab over.

The thought of it made Tony shutter—remembering the glitches in the suit, the feeling of helplessness as his gauntlets had seized up, then moved of their own accord as if in some twisted _Twilight Zone_ episode. Then there had been the smell of the repulsors searing through the ambassador, and a scream that had abruptly cut off.

Tony pressed the crook of one elbow to his mouth, fighting back the urge to be sick all over the sparkling floor. He’d told himself not to think about that, to push it down and try to forget that it had ever happened. _It hadn’t been him._ Wasn’t that what they had all tried to drill into his head?

And yet it had been him inside the suit— _his_ hands inside he gauntlets. He should have been able to stop it. That’s what heroes did. They stopped bad people from hurting innocent bystanders.

If Tony was honest, he’d never been particularly good at at the job—no where near the big league heroes like Steve. He was just happy when he managed to help out, he’d even been able to here, in the middle of King Arthur’s freaking Camelot, able to build elaborate tinker toys or no. But at the end of the day, Tony was still just a guy inside a tin can.

A loud _caw_ came from above Tony’s head, and Morgana looked up. “Ah, there she is. I’d begun to think she got lost.”

A crow the size of an eagle glided down into the courtyard to perch on the shoulder of the Iron Man suit. Apart from one white flight feather, the bird was jet black. So help him, if the bird shat on the armor, Tony couldn’t be help accountable for what he did next. The giant crow puffed its wings and clacked its beak at Tony as if it could read his hostile thoughts. Then, in an eerie imitation of Morgana’s own voice, it made a laughing noise.

More probably, it was reading _Morgana’s_ thoughts, and her distaste for Tony.

“ _Nia_ ,” it said, parroting it’s name. “ _Nia, nia._ ”

The witch’s translucent visage drifted closer to the bird. “Stark, come here and examine my bird.”

Tony sighed, pushed himself up off of all fours, and wiped his burning hands on the front of his ratty trousers.

He’d assumed at first that Morgana enjoyed the power that came with ordering him to do the most menial of tasks. To a degree, he was still certain that she did, but there was more to it than simple pettiness. Although she would never admit it, she was limited—dependent on him and the armor—to interface with the physical world in ways she no longer could from her self-imposed exile to a parallel dimension.

The bird snapped it’s beak at him again as Tony reached his hands out to it.

“It’ll go quicker if you cooperate,” he muttered under his breath. No such luck, it contorted it’s neck and bit one of his aching hands as they closed around the dark, feathered body. The bird’s keel bone was painfully prominent under the oily ruff and it glared at him with murderous black eyes. “Your crow is all feathers and bone. It probably just needs a decent meal.”

“No, it couldn’t be that. Something is clouding my hold on her mind.” The Phantom Queen’s eyes narrowed, as though she were looking through Tony and the bird. “No magic lingers on her?”

“How would I _tell?”_

Annoyed, but recalling who she was talking to, Morgana said, “Take her up to my work room, then.”

* * *

 

Morgana’s work room was high in the south tower. It was close to the outer walls of the castle and overlooked a meadow of spring green grass and the winding road that lead up to the castle —all the better to see visitors, or perhaps a half-brother approaching with an army.

The first time that the armor had marched Tony up here, one repulsor pointed at a spot of Tony’s back which was roughly in line with his heart, she had made him draw sigils around a circle set into the floor. It looked to Tony like the blood furrow on a butcher’s block, only perfectly round.

As a general rule, Tony hated magic, but that was because he was a man of science—a discipline that followed strict rules. Now he was beginning to suspect that there _were_ rules at play here. A pattern was slowly emerging. Morgana depended on him for all of the practical work, watching him with a sharp eye. When a spell required words, Morgana was the one who performed the incantation.

Refusing to help Morgana, as he’d done initially, had been thoroughly unpleasant. He’d been little more than a puppet—the armor gripping his wrists, wrenching his arms to perform the crude spell work. That had been the extent of the armor’s participation—well, and as a tacit threat to keep Tony in line. Tony suspected that there was a reason behind Morgana’s choice in assistants, else why would she make a point of using him and not it?

So Tony had given in, cried _uncle_. At least with autonomy, he reasoned, he could look for subversions. It wasn’t his first time dealing with kidnapping, after all.

Tony let the grumpy bird go. It flapped up to perch on the top of Morgana’s looking glass, and made something that might have been a hissing noise.

“Light one of the tallow candles and bring it here,” Morgana instructed, coming to a stop beneath the crow. She had no reflection in the mirror.

A week ago Tony wouldn’t have been able to tell one candle from another. If he was honest, he still wasn’t sure how a tallow candle differed from beeswax, or why it mattered, but he scooped up one of the cream colored taper candles and put it in a holder. As he struck a flint to light it, he heard Morgana utter something in a tongue that sounded vaguely English—maybe if it had been put through a blender. There were familiar syllables, but nothing Tony could comprehend.

It was midday; the light shining through the large windows was more than enough to illuminate the tower room. But as the flame caught on the wick, the world dimmed, like the sun had slipped behind a cloud, even though there were none in the sky.

When Tony stood in front of the mirror beside Morgana, he saw that it no longer reflected the room, but had instead become a scrying glass.

They were looking at a darkened castle room. The curtains were drawn tight for an old man who lay feverish in a large four-poster bed, his long white hair and beard matted to his head with sweat.

Morgana cackled. “The great fool is ill. How delightful. But if the intrusion is not from Merlin, then who?”

Tony stared. “That’s Merlin?” _If only this were a video conference, and not scrying_ , Tony thought. He could get word back to Arthur, ask for help.

Time seemed to slow to a stop then, all sounds abruptly dying. Tony looked at Morgana, but she was frozen beside him. Outside one of the windows, he could see another of her giant crows, suspended in mid-flight.

“Look here, Knight,” Tony heard a cracked, wizened voice say, and turned to look at the mirror again.

The bedridden man was looking right at Tony.

“Don’t look so surprised, boy,” Merlin said. “You called one of my names and invoked the power in it.”

So he had. But what did Merlin mean by _invoke power_ , was Tony really responsible for stopping time? “Can you help me? I’ve been cursed.”

“Do I look in any fit state to help?” Merlin groused. “It took the better part of my strength to sew up the wound she ripped when she stepped across universes.”

“So you’re the reason she wasn’t able to just magic herself back here?”

“You’re not as stupid as you look.”

“She’s not completely gone, though. If you wanted to seal her away, you failed.”

Merlin grimaced. “That is troubling. But she was never the point of it. Something evil is lurking, wherever she went, something _big._ I sutured what I could to keep it from coming through, but it doesn’t surprise me that something small, like her spirit, is able to pass through still. Under no circumstances must you allow her to reopen the wound she tore. I don’t have the power to staunch it again, and Arthur does not have anyone else at present on whom he can rely regarding such matters.”

Tony’s mouth went dry, realizing no help would be coming. “How?” And then, remembering that his tech had seemed like wizardry to Arthur’s court, added, “I’m not familiar with the type of magic she’s performing.”

“She has spell books, does she not? Are you illiterate?”

“No…”

“Then learn what you must and keep her and _it_ locked away.”

Merlin closed his eyes, resting his damp head on the pillow again. Whatever strange, transient bubble of time had been created dissolved. Tony could hear the rustle of feathers, and the quiet whir of robotic servos from Iron Man. Outside, the crow that had hung suspended soared past the window and disappeared.

“Did you hear me?” Morgana snapped at Tony.

“No,” he confessed.

“Take Nia back to roost. Make sure she eats something.”

* * *

 

The castle north tower’s interior was gloomy and damp, much like the mists that spilled over the castle’s grounds each morning and evening. It also smelled faintly of mildew, and in some places, ammonia. The climb to the tower’s cupola, where the crows nested, was tiring, but at least at the top Tony was rewarded with fresh air. Some quick rummaging in a barrel yielded coarse, dry grain, and since Tony had no interest in hand-feeding the diabolical bird, he scattered several handfuls on the stone floor.

The bird clacked its beak at him again, then hopped down on the splintering wood, pecking at the offering.

Since Tony was here and not looking forward to returning to cleaning, Tony decided to make his rounds and check on the other creatures Morgana kept in her strange menagerie. The collection was housed throughout the tower, but the bulk of it was in what once might have been a dungeon. It’s makeup ran the gamut from mundane toads and lizards, to the more exotic manticore and unicorn. The latter were harder to care for—and not just because of the inherent danger. The little creatures didn’t know they were being kept as a stockroom for spells and potions; not so with the manticore and the unicorn. It was obvious to Tony in the way the manticore paced behind the bars, tail lashing as it dragged a shackle and chain. Less overt, but equally telltale was the way the unicorn always stood in the far back of the dungeon cell, ears drooping, her coat a dull gray instead of white.

When he found a way out, Tony resolved, he’d free _all_ of Morgana’s prisoners with him.

In the meantime, Tony was stuck with small gestures of goodwill. He fished a few browning apple slices from his pocket that he’d saved from breakfast, slid his hands through the bars of the unicorn’s cage, and set them down in the straw.

The manticore, he concluded, turning his attention to the neighboring cell, would need new bedding— there was no way he was opening up the cell door by himself, though. He’d need Morgana and the armor for that. Great. One more thing he wouldn’t look forward to.

He heard a soft crunch and the sounds of chewing. Then his hair stood on end as he heard the unicorn say, “Thank you.”

Tony spun around. “You can talk.”

“Of course I can talk,” she said.

Tony’s mind did some gymnastics to keep his mouth from gaping. “Sorry. I’m not used to talking animals.”

Her ears flicked at the word _animal_ and Tony realized he’d probably insulted her.

“I’m not used to magic…anything…really.” He added another sorry after this for good measure, which seemed to placate her.

“If you aren’t an apprentice, then how did you come to work for a witch?”

Tony shrugged. “The same as you, probably. Caught me with my defenses down.”

The unicorn surveyed Tony’s hands with an impassive blue eye. “I believe you. She does not seem to treat you much better than us. Put your hands through the bars.”

Tony raised one eyebrow, but did as he was told, presenting his dried, reddened hands palm up between the iron bars. The unicorn dipped her head, touching the point of her horn first to one, then the other. It felt as thought Tony had dipped his hands in cool, running water. The ache and burn dissipated, washed away in magical currents.

Tony pulled his hands back, holding them up to his face in amazement. “Neat trick. Wish you’d been around when I needed my heart repaired.”

“I don’t understand. Your heart is broken?”

Tony smiled sadly. What a way to put it. In a way, it probably was. He thought of Steve sidelining him, and how terrified he’d been that he wasn’t good enough to stay with the Avengers. The memory burned like a lump of hot steel in Tony’s throat. “Not anymore”—which was a half lie. “Had some doctors patch me up.”

“Then why did they only do half the job?” the unicorn replied, puzzling Tony. He was pretty sure his heart was currently functioning just fine. Before he could ask what she meant, he heard the all-too familiar sound of heavy footsteps descending into the dungeon. The suit of armor had been sent to fetch him. It would seem his time playing hooky from Morgana was up.

* * *

 

177A Bleecker Street always looked like a shabby little apartment building, deep in the heart of Greenwich village. Every time Steve had visited—which admittedly was not very frequently—he’d been struck by how much bigger on the inside it was.

In some ways, the old building and it’s mausoleum-like airs reminded Steve of himself. Some rooms within the labyrinthian sanctum probably hadn’t had a human soul set foot inside them since before Steve had been born. As they passed a dusty corridor, Steve revised that estimate upward: entire wings may well have sat abandoned for decades.

Wong stopped the pared down group of Avengers in front of a pair of carved, mahogany doors, slipping inside the study to announce Strange’s guests.

Bethany took the opportunity to lean over and ask, “If he’s the Sorcerer Supreme, shouldn’t he know we’re here?”

Steve frowned. “I don’t think his powers work like that. Anyway, I wouldn’t want to interrupt a powerful wizard mid-spell. Good recipe for disaster.”

Bethany straightened up again as the double doors were pulled open, and Wong ushered them inside.

The study was much as Steve remembered it from last time: crammed from floor to celling with bookshelves, a yellowed globe overlaid with foreign, handwritten symbols, the big windows hung with red velvet curtains. Strange was standing at the back of the room, staring up into a shaft of sunlight, deep in contemplation.

“What you asked me for is impossible, Captain,” he finally said, turning around and inclining his head to the group of Avengers by way of greeting. “I’ve looked through every tome I have that concerns chronomancy, and a spell to pluck a person out of the time has enough variables to begin with. An unknown era and secret identity means the risk of accidentally bringing back the wrong person and distorting time grows exponentially. The danger is simply unacceptable.”

Steve felt his heart sink. If there was anyone capable of understanding the magic of time travel better than Doom, Strange was it. To be told _no_ was devastating. “Are there any options on the table?”

“Well…” Strange twirled a finger in his goatee. “There might be, if you could render the unknown identity problem moot. But it still depends on being able to find the era that he was sent to.”

“Could we narrow it down by historical account?” Bethany asked.

Strange cocked his head, taking in the new comer. “Assuming he hasn’t been sent to a time or place that we lack writings from, possibly. That’s a big assumption, though. Recorded history is little more than a blink in the life of the universe. You also risk creating a paradox by relying directly on information you may negate by bringing him back to the present.”

“Then what do you propose?” Steve asked, sensing that Strange had something else in mind.

“If you can get someone back in time to find Iron Man, I can pull _that_ person back to the present, let the spell leach a bit and create a bubble to pull a passenger along with them.”

“Great,” Steve said, half-heartedly. “But that still doesn’t help us narrow down when he might be.”

“No, you are correct. It’s only half a solution.”

“Captain, if I may?” Thor ventured, raising a finger. “If the way back is unimportant, then there is a place I know that might serve.”

Figuring he had nothing left to lose, Steve nodded. “Shoot.”

“On Asgard, there is a place called the Cave of Time. There is a story of a widower warrior who grieved that he had spent years separated from his wife at sea and war. When she died, he entered the cave, searching for the entrance to Hel so that he might give her the time he had forfeited in life. But a goddess took pity on him, and where there was once only one path through the cave, he found there were two. He followed the sound of his wife’s voice, and stepped out of the cave, ten years prior. If the way back is unimportant, perhaps by marrying the two methods, we may gain success.”

Steve turned to Strange. “Doable?”

The sorcerer smiled. “I’d say it’s at least worth a shot.

* * *

 

“What should I call you?” Tony asked, passing a whole apple through the unicorn’s cell door. After recounting what he had learned from Merlin, she had agreed to help him, and Tony realized he didn’t even know who his accomplice was.

“Are you asking for a name?”

“I suppose…do unicorns have them?”

“We have names,” she replied, more patient than Tony would have been if their roles had been reversed. “Though I am an exception.”

“Why?”

“Because Morgana took it.”

Tony blinked. “Why would she do that?” _Never mind the how, right now._ So far the spell books Tony had read, searching for the cogs beneath the cuckoo clock, were starting to unravel _him_ instead of the arcane mysteries they had promised.

“Because a name has power. She’d have been foolish to let me keep mine. Did she not take yours?”

“No…as far as I know, I’m still Tony. Anthony Edward Stark,” he said experimentally. “She didn’t even take my middle name.”

“Well it’s _a_ name,” the unicorn stressed, blue eyes burrowing under Tony’s skin in the darkness of the torch-lit dungeon. “A name your father gave you. But that doesn’t mean it holds much power. They rarely do unless they _mean_ something to the holder. With you…” Tony felt like squirming under that piercing blue gaze—it was a very Steve-like look, “it might hold even less. No, she took something different from you, didn’t she?”

Tony felt sick as realization dawned. “Yeah.”

She’d taken away his other identity. She’d taken the one he was _proud_ of. She’d taken away being _Iron Man_.

* * *

 

Tony twisted a crow feather in his fingers beneath the table, fraying the barbules of the sleek black plume as he looked out the window of the south tower at the grassy knoll and forest beyond, yearning to be free of Morgana—yearning to be free of this time. He missed the Avengers, and he felt especially hollow inside when he considered that he might never see them again—especially Steve.

He’d been on the verge of telling Steve who he was, wanted to come clean outwardly, but also inwardly. For years now, Tony had been quietly nursing a glass full of feelings for the guy, and Tony was beginning to suspect that the cup would never run dry.

Somehow he’d make it back, Tony told himself. For now, he was stuck, and there was work to do, so he’d put his head down and try to wrap his engineer’s mind around the problem at hand.

A toad the size of a cat was sitting in a bowl to Tony’s left, making a grotesque croaking noise. Tony flipped a page in the timeworn grimoire in front of him and glared at it. Toad slime! Whoever figured out that a spell required a _prystine blaec feder_ , or _myre fram the back uf a bulle toad,_ anyway? Were there substitutes? Would a frog work just as well? He rolled his eyes and scooped the noisy little pest out, wrinkling his noise at the marshy smell. _Well, here goes nothing,_ he thought, scrubbing as much slime as he possibly could onto the black feather.

He told himself it could have been worse, as he set the wriggling—and no doubt confused—toad back into its bowl and presented the feather to the Phantom Queen for inspection, hoping the slime would conceal the way he’d disturbed the feather’s form.

At least the witch didn’t want him to kill anything to work the spell.

On the other hand, it was a spell meant to bring her back into this dimension—which Merlin had explicitly warned him to stop. Even if he hadn’t, Tony had no interest in helping her return from the pocket-universe that she had hastily banished herself to when he’d first arrived at her doorstep. She could rot there for all he cared, and he’d do his best to see that it happened, while trying not to inadvertently blow anything up.

“Suitable,” Morgana sniffed. “Throw it in with the rest.”

Her ghostly image was floating near a cauldron of what looked like bubbling tar pitch that smelled of swamp gas. It, along with Tony’s achy back, was the fruit of an afternoon’s worth of preparation.

Tony tossed the slimy feather in drew back, coughing as blue smoke erupted from the cauldron. The smell of swamp was gone, replaced by the odor of sulfur.

Morgana’s face was a mask of cold fury. “What treachery is this?”

Tony was too busy hacking up his lungs to reply. _So much for not blowing things up…_

To his surprise, Morgana didn’t round on him immediately. Instead, she began muttering to herself. “The wards between worlds are too strong. There must be a way to weaken them… But why?” Now her eyes snapped back to Tony, who was still working on getting his wind back.

“Find a spell to identify magic.”

Tony reluctantly pulled himself back up to the wooden workbench and thumbed through the leathery pages until he found something that looked approximately like the olde english for the spell she wanted.

“This only talks about a chalk circle,” Tony said, flipping the page over, expecting more. It seemed far too straightforward for magic, in his admittedly limited experience. There were a few embellishments in the drawing, but nothing else.

“Then draw it. Here, beneath me.” She waved so show him where she meant.

Tony rummaged till he found a stick of chalk tucked away beneath an old, calcified jar of ink, and bent down on hands and knees, drawing the circle as best he could from memory.

A true circle, the drawing was not. Tony needed drafting paper for that. In the end, the chalk outline was more of an oval, bisected by a large triangle, with runes along each of the three sides. When Tony was finished, he backed off, wiping the chalk dust from his palms. Morgana seemed pleased enough with his work, though, and she shut her eyes, murmuring a chant.

When she opened her pale eyes several minutes later, the pupils were pinpricks, and she wore a dazed expression. She wasn’t seeing Tony, or the tower anymore, her sight was turned to the plane her corporeal body was. “So much raw power,” she muttered. “I’ve only glimpsed the waves, but here is the ocean…Here is…Chthon.”

Tony felt the blood drain from his face at the name. Tony understood now why Merlin had drained himself to close the door Morgana had flung open. Whether or not the old wizard knew the name _Chthon,_ if he’d felt the evil of the elder god leeching into their universe, then it would have been obvious that the way between worlds needed to be cauterized.

Morgana didn’t seem to share Merlin’s instincts for self-preservation. She was exalting in the dark power.

Where were they in her timeline? She’d tried to summon Chthon once before, in Tony’s, and it had been a disaster. She’d thought she could control the elder god and been gravely mistaken. If Morgana was entranced at the name, she must not realize the seriousness of the situation. She’d banished herself to the same dimension as a soul-devouring, mad god, and now she wanted to break down the barriers that kept him at bay.

“You shouldn’t weaken the wards,” Tony warned her. “You can’t make his way to earth any easier. He’s too powerful.”

“He has power that could help me usurp my brother,” Morgana said, a desire so raw in her voice that it sounded like lust. “This is my way back and the means of my ascension, all in one.”

“You can’t control him.”

Her eyes lost their frostiness, like an ice cube melting. “Don’t’ presume to tell me what I can and cannot do. I am a Queen, you aren’t even a knight anymore.”

Tony almost laughed—as if he’d ever been the right caliber for a knight. Then Tony felt metal fingers curl around his throat, squeezing till it was hard to breathe. Tony knew she wouldn’t kill him—not while she still needed him for her witchcraft. And no one had ever shut Tony Stark up easily. “Don’t say…I didn’t warn you—you’re asking me…to help you dig …our graves.”

“Get him out of my sight.”

The armor constricted its fingers tighter, and Tony blacked out.

* * *

 

At times heightened senses were a liability rather than an asset. Asgard, the crown jewel of the seven realms was, unfortunately, the sort of place were the former case was always true. So it was a relief when the splash of colors faded as the Avengers, Bethany, and Dr. Strange followed Thor into the relative dim, passed the armed guard on sentry outside the mouth of The Cave of Time.

Inside the air was damp, the only light pulsing from glowing blue runes.

“What do they say?” Steve asked Thor, brushing his hand over one. They were cold to the touch.

“A warning for anyone who makes it past the guards,” Thor replied. “The cave is full of natural magics, and they can occasionally be unpredictable. The cave may transport you to the time you wish—or it may not.”

“I thought you said it reunited lost loved ones,” Jan said.

“Some of the legends do.”

“Are there other legends about this place?”

Thor coughed. “Well, yes. There’s also a tale about an elven prince who wished to skip ahead to his coronation day and emerged to find his kingdom overthrown by frost giants.”

“Perfect,” Bethany muttered beside Steve.

“So it isn’t guaranteed to take us to Iron Man?” Steve asked.

“Nothing is guaranteed with magic,” Strange muttered as they drew to a stop in front of a dark crevice in the rocks, surrounded by runes. Steve could hear the whistle of moving air below in the darkness, and the sound of dripping water.

“The stories always end better when the goal is noble,” Thor admitted. “But I can think of nothing more noble than finding a friend in need.”

“Who all is going to go through?” Strange held out a hand. “As a reminder, I will need something from each of you—something personal—in order to bring you back.”

“I’m going,” Steve was the first to say, pulling his old dog tags from beneath his shirt and handing them over to Strange.

Thor removed his helm, handing it upside down to Strange. “As will I.”

“Me too,” Jan said, pulling off a ring and dropping it into Thor’s helmet.

Bethany considered for a moment, then pulled a knife and sheared off a lock of her red hair. She looped it into a knot, and threw it in the helm with the other personal effects. “If magic can help you find Iron Man, maybe it can help me find Tony.”

Steve was tempted to ask about the gossip about her and Tony, given the stories that surrounded the cave, but he bit his tongue. Truth be told, because of the feelings he kept guarded for Iron Man, his hopes were sky high.

“Right,” Strange said, hands glowing gold. “The magic words are, _there’s no place like home._ Say it three times, and your trinkets here light up like so. _”_ Each item, in turn, briefly glowed the same gold.

“Didn’t know that was a real spell.” Steve grinned.

“Technically, it’s not. Just a layer to another one. But better that then you mispronouncing or forgetting _garda sakhlga ko'r satharish’a’aal._ ”

Steve felt his tongue knotting up just listening to it. “Good point.”

“Is everyone ready?” Thor asked, and when no one objected, he gripped Mjolnir tight. “Onwards, then!” And he jumped through the crevice, disappearing into the dark.

Seconds passed, and then they heard a splash from below. Thor’s disappointed voice drifted up through the fissure: “I fear I have failed, friends.”

Well, that didn’t bode well.

Jan was next, and the plan seemed to only unravel further as Steve heard another crash into the water and a high pitched noise of frustration.

If this didn’t work for any of them, they were back to square one.

Steve was the next one through. He gripped his shield tight, held his breath as his feet left solid ground, and felt air whipping around him wildly as he fell—and fell, and fell—and then felt himself crashing into dark water.

* * *

 

Tony looked out at the winding river that snaked close to the north side of the castle. A font bubbled up from within the main courtyard, feeding a waterfall that dropped off a marble balcony, straight down a cliff into the swift currents of a river.

It was a way out.

Technically, so was the front door. They’d have the same effect, though, and if Tony was going to hasten meeting the grim reaper, he wanted it to be in style. Swan diving off a waterfall sounded more glamorous than walking out the gate, having a heart attack, and belly-flopping into the acid moat that ringed the south-side of the castle.

Of course, Tony preferred the as-of-yet theoretical way out that _avoided_ putting him six feet under.

He looked down at the small, glass decanter in his hand. In the sunlight, at just the right angle, the crimson blood inside shimmered, pearlescent. He could still smell the copper taint of it from where he’d tried to scrub the stain from beneath his fingernails—could still feel the way it had caked in the grooves, and still felt sick.

He’d had to cut the unicorn ten times to fill the small decanter. To Tony’s horror, the blood clotted too quickly to gather it in one clean go. He’d apologized each time, and each time the unicorn had told him to do what was necessary. But the voice had grown fainter with every successive cut by the iron dagger.

Iron, he’d learned, was anathema to magical creatures like unicorns.

By the time the decanter was full, the unicorn had folded her legs beneath herself, lying in the straw. It was too much blood, taken too quickly. If Morgana were patient, she could have ordered Tony to take it little by little, but she was obsessed with the idea of returning to Earth with Chthon in tow, and the sooner the better.

There were a myriad ways, she said, to bridge the worlds: spells to teleport beings from one place to another, spells to cut open the fabric of the universes, or even spells to summon spirits into the physical forms of others—though for a soul like Chthon, it would have to be an exceedingly strong vessel. She considered using Tony only briefly before concluding he’d be ripped apart.

“What, that wouldn’t just set him free?” Tony had asked, filing each detail away.

“No, if you died, Chthon’s spirit would either be forced return to his form in his universe, or die with you.”

Tony had leafed through her summoning spell book afterward, and shuddered at the illustrations and instructions. _Place a knife, coated in the fresh blood of the intended vessel, into a chalice filled with honey, oil, and wine, blessed and cursed by the same tongue._

Tony decided that, even though the spelling was easier to read, he’d much rather go back to the book that called for _toad slyme._

The alternative Morgana had found, as it turned out, wasn’t much better. It was a spell to conjure a door between worlds that called for _the blood of a soul, pure, as a child,_ and her eyes had lit up, dark and wicked, when she realized they had everything they needed on hand.

Now that Tony had the vial in his hand, there was nothing to stop her.

Assuming, of course, that everything was unadulterated. And Tony couldn’t let that happen. Chthon was too dangerous, and much too powerful. From Steve’s account, they’d been lucky at Wundagore, when the elder god had possessed Wanda. With a team of Avengers beside her, Wanda had been strong enough to trap Chthon’s essence in a marionette. Alone, and without his armor, Tony would be all but powerless.

Best to stop things before they could get any worse.

If Morgana needed the blood of a pure soul, he had a foolproof way to meddle with her plans.

Tony thought about how sick he’d felt, returning home after Vietnam, confined to the chest plate, a victim of his own weapons—knowing what he’d made possible, and that he’d been one of the lucky ones. If someone had approached Tony during the flight back to the states and told Tony one day he would be counting on all those sins, he would have laughed in their face.

“A few drops will do,” the unicorn had told him. “Any more than that, and she may be able to tell what you’ve done before you’ve used it.”

Tony uncapped the decanter and took the iron dagger to his left hand. He sliced deep enough to get a thimble’s worth, letting it dribble down and mingle with the unicorn’s before swirling. Then he held the decanter up to the sun. To the unwary eye, nothing would seem amiss. But as Tony looked close, he could see that the faint luster was gone now.

As Tony recapped the decanter, he heard a rustle of wings. One of the large crows had landed a few feet from him, her beady eyes studying Tony. The one white feather marked her as Nia. Had she seen what Tony had done? Or maybe she’d been sent because the Phantom Queen grew impatient…

“What do you want?” Tony asked sullenly.

The crow clacked its sharp beak at him. Tony didn’t have time for a petulant crow.

“ _Nia_ ,” Tony said, recalling what the Unicorn had said about names having power, wondering if he could conjure up at will whatever had passed between himself and Merlin. “ _Go away.”_

The crow’s feathers puffed up, but she didn’t seem to be under any compulsion. Maybe there was more to the trick, or maybe crows had their own secret names…

Tony looked up at the south tower where Morgana’s work room lay. Speaking of failed spells, he wondered what she’d do when her’s didn’t work. She was bound to realize something was amiss, and that it was Tony’s fault. She might decide that she could no longer depend on him, and if she did, the end result would likely be no different than his swan dive idea. His odds seemed no better than a coin-toss.

A chance was better than nothing, though, if it meant seeing his friends again—if it meant seeing Steve.

Tony recapped the decanter and went to go see how the coin would land.

* * *

 

If ever Tony was in doubt about the state of his eternal soul, if was confirmed when the spell exploded—quite literally again. Morgana was, predictably, furious, and she channeled it through the armor with brutal effect.

The armor’s heavy gauntlets layered fresh bruises over the old mottle of black and blue, and the part of Tony that was sardonic to the core couldn’t help thinking that he should have taken Steve up on more hand-to-hand training. Steve would have known how to get out of this. He wouldn’t be helpless without his shield.

Steve had denied that sidelining Iron Man had anything to do with capabilities—but here and now, Tony couldn’t see himself as anything other than a liability.

Perhaps the worst part of it all was knowing that the armor wasn’t even hitting him with it’s full strength. The armor could bench buses. If Morgana wanted it to kill Tony with one punch, it could. Tony took another open-handed blow to the ribs, spat blood, and felt something inside of him splinter—a schism that left him floating above himself, as though he’d been physically pushed from his body, leaving the flesh behind to feel the pain.

He wondered if this was more magic, or if he was dying—had he lost the coin toss?

He watched with detachment as the body he was floating over curled in on itself, hands over its head.

Maybe Steve had been right to sideline him. After all, here he was, the armor bloodying him, not even capable of wrestling back control of his own armor anymore.

Once, Tony had wanted more than anything to tell Steve that it was him beneath that red and gold face mask—wanted Steve to know him fully. But Tony had always been more proud of the armor than the face beneath it. He’d put it off, delayed, told himself he’d do it after the next charity gala, after the next fundraising speech, after he’d scrubbed a little more grime off of his soul.

He’d been teetering on the verge, before Zurrow’s back-room dealing.

He’d probably never get the chance to tell Steve now, and the realization left a bitter taste in his mouth: bile to go along with the blood.

* * *

 

 _No—_ Steve thought desperately, clawing his way through dark water toward what he thought was the surface. _No—_ he couldn’t fail. He broke the surface and took a deep breath, and as the spike of adrenaline lost it’s edge, he realized that he was outside, staring up at a sky full of stars, floating in the middle of a marshy pond.

Something kicked at him, and instinctively he reached down. A hand clawed back at him, and Bethany’s bedraggled red head emerged, spluttering and swearing, but otherwise unhurt. He felt guilty for grinning as he swam for shore, but he was flooded with relief that the cave had worked.

Bethany pulled herself out of the pond after him, looking at the thicket of trees around the water and then craning her neck up. “Well, that’s interesting.”

“What?” Steve followed her gaze up the hill to a gray castle, banners flapping in the wind.

“I’m guessing…middle ages. What do you think?”

Steve frowned, pulling the shield from his back, about to point out that they still had castles around in the present day—before catching sight of a man walking the wall with a bow strapped to his back.

“Also, if we both wound up in the same place, hopefully that means Tony is with Iron Man.”

“True.” Steve mulled the implications of this. Maybe the scientist hadn’t had all the information? Maybe Tony had been sent back in time first and the settings hadn’t been changed. Though what could Doom hope to accomplish by sending Tony to another time? “Guess that rules out the secret vacation theory.”

Bethany shot him a dirty look as she wrung her hair out.

“Sorry, that was in bad taste,” he admitted, squinting at one of the towers. A strong gust of wind billowed a standard out, snapping it so that for a brief moment, the whole flag was visible: a white dragon on a red field. He’d seen it before. “I may know where we are—”

“Told you I saw something!“ Steve heard a voice hiss from beyond the trees.

“You two!” Another voice shouted, and Steve saw the gleam of an arrowhead, nocked and pointed at them. “Drop the shield. And no quick movements, hear?”

Steve froze, even as Bethany whispered, “I was right, more or less, wasn’t I?”

He didn’t need to say anything to confirm her assumptions. The companion of the archer was validation enough. He emerged from the trees, sword in hand, clad in chain mail and tabard. “What do you reckon?” He asked the first. “Witches?”

“More like bandits with that mask.” The archer came into view behind the swordsman, ugly and poxed. He pointed the arrow at Steve, and looked pointedly at the shield. “Come on then, let’s see if we know you from any of the posted bounties.”

Steve hesitated.

There were worse people to be unmasked in front of than Bethany Cabe. Still—his fingers flexed on the leather grip of the shield. He could probably take the archer out with a throw, but at this angle he couldn’t hit them both.

“You know,” the swordsman cocked his head, looking Steve up and down, “more I think about it, more this one seems like the strange fellows that passed through last fortnight.”

Steve’s ears perked up. “Was one of them in red and gold armor?”

The two men exchanged glances.

“He’s our friend,” Steve tried. “We’ve been looking for him.” When he continued to get stony, silent stares, he decided to bite the bullet and pull back his cowl.

The swordsman frowned, but apparently Steve didn’t look like any of the outlaws on their wanted posters. After a few moments of deliberation, he shook his head and sheathed his sword. “A knight matching that description did come through.”

“Do you know where he went?”

The man shrugged. “All I know is that he had an audience with the King, and won his favor. More than that, you’ll have to ask the King hisself.” Then the swordsman waved a hand at them to follow him. “Come on, if you’re friends of the wizard knight, you’re friends of the King. Might as well get you to the castle to clean up.”

As Steve slung his shield over his shoulder, he caught Bethany staring quizzically at him.

“What?” he asked.

She blinked. “Nothing. Just…never pictured Captain America as a blond, I guess.”

He grinned. “Well, if it helps you can call me Steve instead.”

* * *

 

They must have arrived in the middle of the night. It couldn’t have been more than a few hours before sunlight started to creep in through the windows of the room Steve had been given. A few hours was more than enough, as far as he was concerned. He was eager to leave, especially after some poor half-asleep girl had knocked at his door.

When it became clear why she had come, he told her in no uncertain terms that he didn’t want any “female companionship,” and that he’d be much happier if she just went back to her own bed.

To Steve’s irritation, gossip about this seemed to have gotten around because the following morning he was greeted in the main hall by a knight who slapped him on the back and greeted him as, _the blue Gawain._

At first he had thought it was nothing more than a ribald jest. But then another knight entered the hall, spotted him, and said, “Ah, I hear you’re the man after my own heart. Lancelot, quit being an arse.”

And that was when it sunk in. He’d placed the Dragon of Wales on the flag correctly, and Bethany had been right about the rough era. But _good Lord,_ Steve was standing in King Arthur’s court. Bethany, he noticed belatedly, had slipped into the hall, and was seated at one of the long tables nursing a mug of something steaming hot. She was staring off into the middle distance of the room, looking as though she couldn’t quite believe what was happening—which, Steve sussed, meant she had probably connected the dots for herself too.

Steve was still coming to grips with the reality of the situation when the hall’s attention swung to the door, and Steve came face to face with Arthur himself.

He was dressed plainly for a king: a comfortable tunic, a small and simple crown. The only embellishment he seemed to favor was the gold chain around his neck and—of course—the jeweled hilt and scabbard of Excalibur. Belatedly, Steve realized he should probably bow.

“I’m told you are looking for the wizard knight,” Arthur said, waving him up. This was the second time he’d heart Iron Man called the _wizard knight_ and it struck Steve as ironic. Iron Man hated magic. “He did me a great service when my half-sister, Morgana, attacked Camelot. At great personal risk, he went to put a stop to her magic, and managed to turn the tide of undead for us. I had hoped when he did not return that he had found a way home. Your presence here saddens me, as it seems that was not so.”

Steve swallowed, told himself to hope for the best. He wouldn’t give up on Iron Man, not after coming this far. He was one of the most resilient men that Steve knew. “Can you tell us where he went?”

“Morgana’s castle lies to the south of here, two day’s ride. I can offer you provisions and the fastest horses in my stables.” Steve saw men scramble out of the corner, off to make the King’s promise so. “Were it possible, I would have Merlin aid you, but alas he has been ill for some time now, and I have no others trained as he is.”

“We’ll gladly accept whatever you can offer,” Steve said, itching to leave. Two days! If only he had rocket boots. “I have one more question, your majesty. Has a man by the name of Tony been seen here? He would have been wearing strange clothing like my companion, no armor.”

Arthur’s eyes were soft. “Being separated from one’s companions is an awful burden. No, I am sorry, the only other stranger to have come through was the verdant knight.”

“Doom,” Steve said, a hand subconsciously curling into a fist.

“A fitting title for a treacherous soul.”

“You have no idea.” Actually, Steve thought, feeling foolish, he probably did.

If Arthur was offended at the comment, it didn’t show. He only clapped Steve on the shoulder and said, “I have faith you will find your friend. When you do, tell him that he has my eternal gratitude.”

* * *

 

As an engineer, Tony didn’t put much stock in miracles. Why depend on fortune instead of a backup system?

So it came as a shock when he woke up from his beating. He ached all over, and sharp stabbing pain shot through him when he moved his right arm, or either of his legs. But, however unexpected it was, he was alive.

The Phantom Queen, it would seem, was not finished with him.

“You’ll collect the necessary items again,” Morgana informed him curtly, when she’d learned he’d awoken. “Do it correctly this time, or you’ll find I have been lenient.”

Even in a half-lucid state from the pain, Tony knew that wasn’t a good idea. “The unicorn won’t survive another blood letting like that.”

“If a sacrifice is necessary, then so be it. Let it rest on your conscience as the price for sloppy spell work.”

Conversely, Tony decided after that conversation that he was done with Morgana. He’d won the coin-toss once; there’d be no flip to bet on next time. And Tony refused to be party to murder. The best he could hope for was that Morgana would be hampered without Tony until Merlin had regained his strength.

And while Tony might be doomed, but that didn’t mean the rest of the castle’s denizens need be.

Morgana only had herself to thank for Tony’s decision to open up the cages and set her menagerie free. With nothing to lose, it was easy for Tony to finally do what he should have at the start.

* * *

 

The dungeons of the north tower were Tony’s last destination. He went to the unicorn’s cell first, and was dismayed to find her still lying in the straw, eyes heavy and tired. The gash on her flank where he’d drawn blood was still red and inflamed from the iron.

“What are you doing?” she asked, looking up through half-lidded eyes, as he opened the door of her cell and bent down, fishing the bronze key for her shackle from his pocket.

“What I should have done sooner.” The key clicked into place, and the irons fell away. “Can you make it out of here?”

The unicorn stood, testing her cloven hooves. Maybe it was Tony’s imagination, but her coat seemed brighter, even in the dimness of the dungeon torchlight. “Yes, I think so.” Her blue eyes fixed on Tony. “What will become of you?”

He shrugged. “I’ll find my own way out.”

Her nostrils flared wide. For a moment, Tony wondered if she could smell the curse on him. “If you are planning to open the manticore’s cage, you will need my help.”

Well, Tony wasn’t going to look a gift horse—gift unicorn?—in the mouth, especially where creatures with big, pointy teeth were concerned. With the unicorn at his back, he used the key to open the manticore’s cage. She didn’t hesitate as Tony swung the door wide.

Just as hostile as ever, the manticore hissed at them, its whiplike tail thrashing back and forth, lowering itself to the ground, a cat getting ready to pounce.

Tired though she still seemed, the unicorn lowered her horn toward the manticore, inching forward step by step, backing the other creature into the corner of the cell, and drawing the shackle chain tight.

The manticore’s claws extended, and its shoulder muscles flexed. But just when Tony thought it would lunge, the unicorn pressed forward, the tip of her horn coming up to press against the manticore’s maned throat. The effect was instantaneous—potent as any sedative that Tony had seen. The manticore relaxed and began to…purr.

Tony scrambled into the cell and made short work of the irons.

“Convenient,” he said, freeing a shaggy, gold paw. “Don’t suppose that would work on Morgana?”

“It only works on the flesh and blood.”

“Damn,” Tony muttered, watching the manticore wander out of the cell and up the steps, still tame as a kitten.

Maybe he ought to ask her to work that magic on him—maybe it would hurt less when he let the curse run it’s course. Even now it troubled him that he was on the verge of sacrificing himself for a stop-gap instead of a solution.

“Could you perhaps do me a favor?” Tony asked as the unicorn started up the stairs.

She turned. “What do you wish?”

“Do you know King Arthur’s court?”

“I know of it.”

“Can you warn Merlin that I failed? They need to know.” Tony shuddered internally at the idea of an unsuspecting world taken by surprise by Chthon. It would be a bloodbath.

“I will try.” She paused, as if listening to something that Tony couldn’t hear. “But I may not need to…will you free the crows as well?”

That was a puzzling question. “Aren’t they linked to Morgana?”

“They have similarities on the surface, but scratch deep enough and the kinship does not run as deep as you might imagine. In some ways they are more like you.”

“But they aren’t locked up,” Tony pointed out, not sure how to free something that wasn’t tied down.

“No,” the unicorn replied. “But neither were you.”

* * *

 

Ordinarily, Steve wouldn’t have ridden with his cowl down. But the day was hot, the sun still high overhead in the cloudless sky, and Bethany already knew his secret identity, so, for now, Steve was reveling in the breeze running through his hair.

“Where did you learn to ride a horse?” Bethany wondered aloud as they gave the horses a rest, bringing them from a trot to a walk. She was riding a black gelding, while Steve had a sturdy roan mare.

Steve shrugged. “You pick up what you have to during a war, especially to cover ground.”

“Mmm,” Bethany murmured, clearly not satisfied with that answer.

After a few moments with only the sound of the horses hooves on the dirt road, and because Steve had had little beside his own thoughts to occupy him for the day’s ride, he decided a question deserved a question.

“Mind if I ask something personal?”

Bethany shot him a suspicious scowl. “I suppose…I guess it’s only fair if I get to know your secret identity. Shoot.”

Steve smiled inwardly. He hadn’t thought to play that card, and was amused that she’d even mentioned it. “It’s just…Jan and Thor have known Iron Man for years, and for whatever reason the cave didn’t send them through. You’ve known Tony a fraction of that, but you still made it here.”

“Not hearing a question yet.”

Yes, well…he’d been trying to frame it tactfully. “It’s just, well, you seem to be going above and beyond, even for a bodyguard. Any truth to the rumors about you and Mr. Stark?”

He expected an eye roll, or exasperation, and so was taken off guard by her flat assent. “They’re true. Or they were. It was an amicable split, more or less.”

“More or less?” Steve was curious if this factored into her dislike of Iron Man. Maybe he’d disapproved of the two of them together.

“I could do more for Tony as a friend than I could as his girlfriend. We both needed the distance. I watched by late husband drink himself to death. I couldn’t watch Tony do it too.” She saw the horror on Steve’s face, and smiled grimly. “You didn’t know? Did Iron Man never mention it? Maybe _he_ doesn’t know…all’s well an good when it’s just putting himself between a bullet and Tony. He doesn’t seem to recognize that a bottle is just as deadly for an alcoholic.”

Steve was stunned. It didn’t mesh at all with what he knew of Iron Man. But she was right—he’d never mentioned Tony was an alcoholic. “Maybe he just didn’t think it was his place to say…”

“Anything? Even to Tony?” She sounded so sad. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a lonelier person than Tony Stark. You’d think the guy who’s been guarding him all these years would care a little more.”

The Tony that Bethany had been privy to sounded so unlike the Tony Stark that Steve knew. Granted, he wasn’t on intimate terms with the guy, but he’d given him some hand-to-hand training, and as the Avengers financier they’d talked plenty of times. Hell, the man had opened his house to Steve. He’d always seemed so upbeat, but maybe that was by design.

“What about you?” Bethany asked.

“What about me?”

“Why’d the cave send you here after Iron Man and not the others? Any truth to the rumors about _you_ two?” She was turning his question back on him.

Steve sat up a little straighter, feeling himself blush. “What rumors?” He didn’t know about any rumors…there couldn’t be any…could there?

Bethany, he realized too late, had been joking. Now her eyes were lit with amusement at his reaction. _Damn it._ This is what he got for riding with his cowl down. And prying into personal matters. _Damn it, damn it, damn it._

“Oh my…Tony never mentioned that you and Iron Man were together.”

“We’re not,” Steve said, too quickly.

“Not officially?”

“Not at all.”

“Oh—“ her glee was momentarily reigned in.

She’d deduced far too much about Steve for his comfort. He decided that the horses had had enough of a rest—the sooner they found Iron Man and Tony and went home, the better. Before Bethany could ask him anything else, he nudged his horse into a canter, the drumming of hooves silencing further conversation.

* * *

 

Tony leaned out over the north-facing balcony, fingers white knuckles on the iron rail, watching the water sheet down, and listening to the distant roar, giving voice to the call of the void.

 _Better than helping Morgana free Chthon._ Having averted Morgana’s attempt at re-casting the spell to open a door between worlds, she would be searching for the next one to try. But her options were shrinking, and would only get smaller without Tony on hand.

It was funny…he hadn’t felt like this in years, not since he’d last lived with the chest plate, one failed charge away from an early grave. Those days felt like a lifetime ago. Back then he’d woken up knowing every day was borrowed time, and lived accordingly. Even if the armor was the bane of his existence at the moment, becoming Iron Man was still his proudest of accomplishments.

After the surgery that freed Tony from the chest plate, it was easier to forget how little time there was, to push off things, and tell himself that he’d get to them someday…

His thoughts turned to Steve again. If only he had a way to get a message to him, some note that wouldn’t be lost to time and obscurity.

A flutter of wings again announced avian company.

“Come to see me off?” he asked the crow.

Nia spread her wings, but stayed perched near Tony.

“So riddle me this,” Tony said, humoring himself. “How do you free a thing with wings when it isn’t tied down?”

The crow cocked her head, then opened her beak and made the creepy laughing sound.

“Fine, see if I help.”

“ _Nia. Nia, nia.”_ the bird said, then jumped from it’s perch, disappearing into the mists of the waterfall.

Tony stiffened as he heard the tell-tale clunk of the armor’s heavy footsteps behind him. It was now or never if he was going to follow suit.

And then the Phantom Queen appeared beside him.

“Surely you’re not thinking of leaving me now, when we are on the verge of success?” Tony was immediately wary of her smile. She’d been livid with him before.

“How? You don’t have a unicorn anymore. I made sure of that.”

“Oh, you know full well. We spoke at length about the summoning spell.”

He should have guessed that she’d shoot the moon if she no longer wanted Tony as an assistant. “You must be desperate.”

“No,” the triumph in her voice made the hair on the back of Tony’s neck stand up. “The picture has changed.” She pointed a ghostly hand out over the railing, said something that sounded like it came from the throat instead of her mouth, and in the spray of the waterfall, Tony saw a vision of two horseback riders. His eyes grew wide.

_Bethany._

_Steve._

If there was any human body capable of containing Chthon, a super soldier had to rank high on the list. Tony’s mind began to race, desperate to find something that he could do. If he could only warn them, prevent them from setting foot inside the castle…now, more than ever, he missed the armor and his comms.

“You know them then,” Morgana gloated, reading his distress. “Friends come to find their lost companion. How moving.” She looked down at the base of the falls. “But by all means, carry on if you wish…soon I’ll have new help.”

Tony stood frozen to the spot. She knew he wouldn’t—not with friends in danger.

“I thought so.” To the armor, she said, “Bring him up to the work room. We have a spell to prepare.” One of her ghostly hands stroked her chin in thought. “After you’re done, maybe I’ll even let you meet your friends one last time. Yes, the more I think about it, the more that sounds fun.”

Tony glared at her, hating her.

“You heroic types are all the same, always willing to lay yourselves down for friends. What do you think your friends would do, having come all this way, if I offered them a trade?”

Tony didn’t answer.

Morgana grinned. “After they’ve agreed, I’ll make them watch your dying convulsions from the other side of the moat.”

One of the red and gold gauntlets closed on Tony’s wrist, and even though he struggled, Tony couldn’t keep it from dragging him up the south tower.

* * *

 

From afar, the white castle towers rose from the silver mists, ethereal—impossible to discern where one ended and the other began. Up close, the shine of the gilt gave way to tired walls that had been built long ago and had little upkeep, a ghost town in the form of a castle.

Steve swung himself down from his heaving horse, letting the reins drop in the grass, and trudged to the edge of the moat, eying the raised drawbridge and the sheer walls. Neglect had produced uneven edges to the gray stones of the wall, but it would be hard to scale without a rope.

“And here I didn’t bring my swimming suit,” Bethany muttered, coming up beside Steve.

A dragonfly zipped by, darting down over the water. Something sizzled as its legs touched the water, and it took off again, as though burned. On a hunch, Steve pulled up a clod of grass and tossed it into the middle of the moat. Whatever glamor made the acid appear to be water, the illusion couldn’t conceal the bubbling or the belch of sulfur as the grass was dissolved.

“Probably a good thing you left it behind,” Steve said, grabbing his shield and dropping into a defensive stance as the sound of fizzling acid gave way to the groan of chains.

The drawbridge creaked as it descended to eye height, at which point Steve stood up straighter and grinned. He could see a glint of shiny red armor. “Good old Shellhead. Should have known we’d get here to late.”

Bethany’s face had also lit up. “Tony!”

Iron Man was standing at the mouth of the portcullis, facing them, Tony Stark at his side, with one gauntlet on the businessman’s shoulder. Tony looked the worse for wear—even at a distance Steve could see that there were circles under his eyes, and that he was thinner. That might have been due to how odd he looked in the ragged tunic, though, instead of a crisp, ironed suit and tie.

Steve frowned as the bridge clattered to the ground on their side of the moat.

Was that a gag in Tony’s mouth? His hands were behind his back too, as though they might be tied. Maybe there was a perfectly reasonable explanation if Iron Man had just rescued him…but even after the bridge had been completely lowered, neither man moved.

Steve cupped his hands to his mouth. “What are you waiting for? Come on! We can get you home!”

Tony’s eyes grew wide. Iron Man stayed stock still, as though he hadn’t heard.

And then the ghastly phantasm of a dark haired, green eyed woman walked _through_ Tony and Iron Man. Beside him, Bethany gasped.

“Let me guess. Morgana?” Steve said when the woman stopped at the end of the drawbridge. He noted the way her eyes flickered from the edge of the drawbridge to the grass that Steve and Bethany were standing on.

“You have the stink of my half-brother on you,” she replied. “Are you a new knight?” Her eyes flicked to Bethany. “What a strange squire.”

“No. I’m just here for my friend,” Steve said.

Morgana’s eyebrow rose. “You may have him, for a price.” She raised a hand and Iron Man shoved Tony forward. He stumbled a few steps out onto the drawbridge before coming to a halt.

 _Mind control,_ Steve thought, stomach sinking. This would be a lot less straightforward than he’d initially hoped.

“I’m not going anywhere without both of them.”

Her eyes glittered. She definitely knew something that Steve didn’t. “You won’t have to. I propose a trade: the man may leave if you stay in his place.”

He saw Tony shaking his head. He felt Bethany’s hand on his arm. “Something seems wrong,” she whispered.

But all he had to do was get to Iron Man and say the magic words…Bethany could get Tony home, and if worst came to worst, he and Iron Man had been in tougher situations together before.

“You’ve got a deal.”

Morgana’s mouth curled triumphantly.

* * *

 

Tony’s heart thundered in his chest, hearing Steve agree to their doom. If only he’d been in the armor, maybe he could have somehow signaled to Steve that he shouldn’t take her bargain. It was probably some magic rule written down somewhere, _never bargain with a witch._

Even without the luxury of facial expressions, he felt he had a rapport with Steve in the suit that he lacked as Tony Stark. Would he have listened if it were Iron Man shaking his head? Maybe…

Not that it mattered anymore. Steve had already agreed to the faustian bargain. He watched, terrified, as Steve stepped onto the drawbridge. Like Tony, this seemed to be bounds that Morgana could haunt. She floated out to Steve, raised her translucent bony arms to his shoulders, and said something that Tony couldn’t hear. In a flash, they both disappeared. They’d be in the north tower now. Behind Tony, the armor turned, no doubt headed to join them.

“Tony?” Bethany was calling to him, though her voice sounded fuzzy, like it was coming from behind a wall. His blood was rushing with adrenaline. Next thing he knew, she was beside him, pulling the gag off, and cutting the rope from his wrists. “Come on, I can get you home. _There’s no place like home—“_

“Stop—stop! I can’t go!”

She cut off abruptly. “Why?”

“Morgana has a curse on me. If I leave, I die.”

He’d been half-convinced that his heart was going to stop when the armor pushed him out onto the drawbridge. He needed to pull himself together. He needed to get up to the tower. If he was too late…

_If you died, Chthon’s spirit would either be forced return to his form in his universe, or die with you._

Tony’s mind recoiled at the thought as he started to run for the tower, Bethany at his heels.

He knew there was no way he’d be able to kill Steve. He couldn’t let it come to that.

* * *

 

One moment Steve was outside, the next he was inside a stuffy room, lit by torches. He was standing inside a circle, carved into the stone floor, and at each cardinal point of its perimeter a black candle had been lit. Dark wax was already dripping from their centers into the circle’s rut, which was glowing faintly blue. Steve reached out toward one, only to find an invisible wall, strong as stone.

Several feet outside the circle, a dark goblet was sitting on the floor. The rest of the room was a strange collection of dusty bottles, sheaves of dried plants, and shelves of books. On top of one bookcase, a large crow was perched, watching him.

In the far corner, a full length mirror reflected the scene—everything except Steve. Where he should have been, something with glowing red eyes was crouched in the circle. It’s lower face writhed, and with a sick feeling, Steve realized he was staring at an elder god.

“Almost there,” Morgana muttered to the reflection. “Almost there…”

Steve felt something sticky creeping over him, thick and vile, like oil or tar dripping down his back. He realized, dimly, that that was how Wanda had described it in her debriefing, after they’d returned from Wundagore. She’d said she’d only recount it once, for the official report—and now Steve understood why.

“Finally,” Morgana muttered, as Iron Man entered the small tower room, a gleaming dagger in his hands.

“Shellhead!” Steve cried, realizing that getting through to his old friend might be the only way to salvage the situation. “I don’t know what that witch has done to you, but I need your help!”

Iron Man didn’t reply—didn’t even acknowledge Steve. He advanced, and for reasons that Steve couldn’t comprehend, he was able to cross the invisible barrier of the circle.

And then it all happened so quickly…

The gauntlets pried open one of Steve’s hands, curling the dagger between his fingers. At first Steve was confused—why would they give him a weapon? But then Iron Man forced Steve’s hand backward. Steve felt the dagger enter him, just beneath his ribs.

It hurt—physically, but also because he knew what this meant to Iron Man. Steve knew it would eat him alive inside, being forced into this. Steve’s hands came up, curling around the gauntlet, holding Iron Man tight. He wanted to ensure Iron Man knew this wasn’t his fault. “I know you wouldn’t do this if it were your choice.”

Steve tried to focus on Strange’s spell and push past the fact that he’d been stabbed, deep even for what a super soldier could take. The words tumbled from his lips, and he waited.

But nothing happened, and Iron Man tried to rip his arm away, making Steve wince as the motion pulled at his wound.

Across the room, he heard a high, cruel laugh. “If you are a wizard, you know very little about magic. Nothing you try inside that circle will work while the candles are lit.”

Steve stared at Morgana dumbly, the weeping gash in his side flecking the stone at his feet in blood. So much for plan A…and B…

Steve began to grope for a plan C, right as Tony and Bethany burst into the room.

* * *

 

Tony saw the blood on the knife, and anger, hot and bright, blossomed in his chest, cherry red coals fanned into a flame. Using the armor to hurt Tony would have never been enough to reignite the embers that had been smoldering inside of him, but seeing it used to hurt Steve…

There was no thought, no second guessing about what he had to do now.

He still had his own knife on him, and he drew it, slicing the blade across his offhand, reopening the old wound. He was closer to the chalice than the armor, and it was still trying to free itself from Steve. By the time that Morgana realized what Tony intended to do, it was too late.

Unable to escape Steve’s vice-like grip, Tony saw the armor break apart, come rushing toward him, trying in vain to stop him. The first piece, one of the shoulders, hit him like a shockwave, molding itself around him. But by then, Tony had already dropped his knife into the chalice, completing the spell.

 _Welcome back,_ Tony thought, as each piece ratcheted into place around him. _Miss me?_

He heard Morgana scream—couldn’t make out the words over the rushing of a wind—no, it was the sound of something enormous breathing behind him. It only got louder as the armor finished reassembling around Tony and the faceplate flipped closed. He turned, but Bethany was the only person there, mouth open and terrified. She was saying something too—lips forming into something that might have been _Tony_.

The armor locked up around him.He felt hot, stifled, as though he was bursting at the seams—too big to be contained by a single body.

_He’d rip you to shreds._

In his mind, Tony felt something twitch, stir to life, something that was alien and different, like a puzzle with a wrong piece wedged into the picture.

With it came a surge of power and time seemed to slow—he could see Morgana’s hold on the armor now, the magic given visual form. All this time, it had only been a thin tendril of white light. She was using it now, trying to tie him down, hoping the armor could contain what Tony’s body couldn’t. He could hear her muttering that it wasn’t right. He could hear her thoughts, feel her desperation, as she told herself, _I can fix this. The girl can be my new hands._ He could see that she was a fraud, depending on stolen power.

Morgana wasn’t even her name. _Phantom Queen_ was never her title to claim.

 _It’s yours, isn’t it?_ Tony asked the crow, perched on the bookcase. _Badb, Macha, Nemain—geez, you have a ton._

Inside his head, Tony thought that he could hear the crow’s laugh again. _And why not? There’s power in names. You know that now. Name us true, and you will have the answer to your riddle._

_Morrígan. You were once called The Morrígan._

He heard a deep, contented sigh in his head, and at the same time, Morgana’s power ebbed, the chain holding the armor as thin as a spider’s strand of silk.

 _You’ll not have long after you break the chain,_ The Morrígan warned him, _but we will give you a bit more, in repayment of our debt._

He knew what came next…

Tony broke Morgana’s tenuous thread with one of the gauntlets. It was as easy as snapping a thread. She wailed, and just like that, the armor was _his_ again, and the world was right. Tony felt whole.

Whole, but bigger than he once had been. He was brimming with power, like an aged wizard.

If only he could savor the moment. But Chthon’s mind and essence was growing and writhing inside of him, it wouldn’t be long now till the whole of him was filled up and replaced.

The armor now under Tony’s control, he sprinted for the window and jumped. He had minimal flight capabilities—parts of his rocket boots had been cannibalized for the ill-fated time-travel device. Still, the altitude was high enough for Tony to clear the castle wall. He didn’t need to get much farther. As he crossed the invisible barrier of the curse, he felt his heartbeat begin to falter, twitching in his chest like a fish on dry land.

He landed in the grass field, and badly. It felt like there was a bag of broken glass shards inside of him.

Somewhere, Tony heard the gnashing of teeth, felt the heaviness of a foreign mind in his head retreat.

 _That’s right,_ he thought. _Run or see me in hell, Chthon. Your choice._

He felt himself slipping away, almost like the elder god was taking Tony with him.

If Tony could only hold on for a few more moments, he’d be the happiest man in the world. He could see Steve and Bethany running, leaving a castle that was fading like a ghost, sublimating into the mist.

Tony closed his eyes, saw black wings behind his eyelids, and willed his heart to keep beating for just a bit longer.

* * *

 

The armor was lying face down in the field. A breeze rippled through the green blades of grass, but that was the only movement in the field. Steve bent down, picking up the armor’s cleaved helmet, running his fingers over the sharp bend in the metal where the impact from the fall had warped and dented it, cracking the helm in two.

Steve sat, the dew in the grass wet and cold as he gathered Tony into his arms. Beneath Tony, the ground had been gouged by his fall. The dirt was so terribly red.

“Tony?” Steve tried, the other man’s cheeks were cold, but Steve felt for a pulse and found one, weak and erratic. He was rewarded with one of Tony’s blue eyes cracking open.

Sometimes hope is an unstoppable river. Sometimes it’s a leaky faucet. It dribbled inside Steve now, spluttering in fits and starts, even as Tony’s eyes searched in vain for the voice, his sight gone.

He’d sat with people like this before—mostly buddies from the war. _Hearing’s always the last sense to shut down,_ the nurses told him.

“Cap?” Tony muttered thickly, as though he didn’t really believe that Steve was there, like this was some fever dream. “I’m so sorry…But at least Chthon is gone now. And Morgana…”

“Nothing to apologize for,” Steve said firmly. “You did good.”

“I should have told you--”

Steve had had his suspicions over the years. They’d worked side-by-side in the Avengers—how could he not? Everything had clicked into place so naturally when the armor went to pieces—when Steve watched how naturally they fit into place around Tony.

In that moment, Steve had known it was Tony under the armor all along. Tony’s breathing came slower now, and his eyes began to shut.

“Tony? Tony, stay with me,” Steve urged, fingers curling around Tony’s shoulders, trying not to squeeze too tightly. “Just hold on, we’ll get you home and—”

“I just want you to know—” Tony slurred, like a man talking in his sleep. Steve heard soft footsteps in the grass as Bethany knelt beside Tony too.

Steve could say the magic words. He could take them back. There had to be a way to fix this, he thought numbly, even as Tony faded in his arms.

“Wish I’d told you before…sorry...” Tony insisted, but his throat seized.

“It’s okay,” Bethany sank down in the grass beside them, eyes bright and glassy, running her fingers through Tony’s curly black hair. “It’s okay. We love you, Tony.”

And then he was gone.

Steve felt a jagged piece of his heart torn out and taken with him—all the things he wished he’d said, all the things he might have if he had only had more time with the man under the armor.

Steve trembled. His hands shook, and realized his face was wet with tears. And Bethany asked how much of the blood was Steve’s, even though he didn’t care…could hardly register the burning in his side where he’d been stabbed.

The part of Steve that had dared to think they’d all get home together dried up with the adrenaline, and the edges of the world went fuzzy as Steve passed out.

* * *

 

Steve woke to the last bits of sunlight fading on his cheeks. Something warm and solid was pressed to his back, and in his lap, he found Tony—his chest was rising and falling softly and he looked peaceful. Steve’s fingers trembled as they felt along his the border of the breastplate and Tony’s neck, finding a slow, steady pulse.

Was Steve dreaming? Maybe the stab wound had been worse than he thought, and he was hallucinating. Or maybe it was magic—magic was outside Steve’s usual expertise, but seemed to be the norm here, if a castle disappearing around him was anything to judge by.

Bethany was there too, leaning close. She grinned. “Oh good, I was beginning to worry you were both too stubborn to wake up.”

He heard an equine snort, and swung his head around, expecting to find the roan he’d rode in on, or Bethany’s black.

He blinked. Definitely hallucinating.

He’d run into many odd things since Project Rebirth, so he was pretty sure he would have learned by now if unicorns weren’t mythical creatures. And yet somehow he was propped up against one.

The unicorn seemed amused. “No, Steven Rogers, your mind is not playing tricks on you.”

Steve looked to Bethany for reassurance that he wasn’t losing his mind. She just held up her hands. “There was magic. I don’t know the technical details, but I checked, and you’re not bleeding anymore. So if I were you, I wouldn’t complain.”

Steve blinked again, then looked down at Tony. His arm was still curled protectively around the red shoulders of the armor. “What about him?”

“I do not know if he will wake up,” the unicorn replied, her sinewy, rope-like tail flicking in the grass. “He puzzles me. The heart is pure, but the mind is troubled. It doubts itself. I can mend the body, but I can’t pull a mind from the sea if it is fixated on drowning. He must be coaxed back.”

“How?” Steve and Bethany asked in unison.

“The heart’s desire is usually a good place to start. Hasn’t any old knowledge lasted to your time?”

“Not much,” Steve confessed, mind running through everything he knew about Iron Man. He’d always loved to fly, especially with Steve, and he stretched himself thin trying to make sure that his friends and loved ones were well taken care of. Neither of those things seemed likely to Steve, though. What Tony wanted, he was usually able to bring to fruition. What could a rich man want that money couldn’t buy, anyway? Was it the siren’s call of a liquor bottle? He studied Bethany’s downturned mouth, and thought that perhaps she was also considering (and discarding) the possibility. Dependence wasn’t the same thing as desire.

“Maybe it’s you,” Steve told her, even as his heart revolted. “Maybe he misses being with you.”

After all, she’d come through the cave, just like Steve had. Maybe they were the ending to another story about reunited lovers.

Bethany’s mouth assumed a crooked, bittersweet smile, as though she couldn’t believe what Steve said. “If you’re suggesting what I think you are, and it works, he’s never going to hear the end of it. But I guess that’s how it works in some fairytales…” She glanced at the unicorn before helping Steve roll Tony onto his back in the grass, his lips parted ever so slightly.

Tony’s facial hair had grown out, and he was pretty scruffy—ruggedly handsome, Steve thought, allowing a whisper of jealousy to steal through him as Bethany bent over Tony and kissed him.

Steve expected for Tony to open his eyes, spring up, and take her in his arms. But when she pulled back, the man was still deep asleep.

“Maybe it wasn’t me, then,” Bethany offered.

Steve’s heart lurched at the suggestion. He’d always hoped Iron Man shared the same budding feelings he had harbored, but he’d never dared to think anything would ever come of them. They were too busy with their lives, and Iron Man had his secrets that he had to keep… It had never seemed possible before.

On the other hand, what did they have to lose now?

Steve swallowed, his mouth feeling dry and his hands clammy. He’d never been good at this sort of thing, and felt supremely self-conscious with observers. He pressed his lips to Tony’s, soft and searching for a hint of reciprocation. After a few moments, he pulled back searching desperately for any signs of stirring, just as disappointed as Bethany—if not more—when Tony didn’t wake.

“So maybe it’s not a person,” Bethany sighed. “Maybe we don’t have what we need here…maybe we should take him back…”

Steve’s mind whirred. Not a person…not likely to be something he could buy…

In his minds eye, he went over the final moments with Tony in his mind. He’d been so adamant about apologizing to them about his dual identity.

And it occurred to Steve, they’d never acknowledged it, only told him that it was ‘okay.’

“Tony?” Steve said loudly and clearly. “It’s Steve and Bethany. Tony wake up, I didn’t come all this way to lose my best friend, Shellhead.”

He could have kissed Tony all over again when he groaned, blue eyes fluttering as his head rolled sideways in the grass. He cracked one eye open wide, the pupil focusing on Steve and how close he was.

Steve fought back a blush and gave Tony space to sit up.

“I have the worse headache,” Tony complained, scratching at his stubbly beard. For a moment or two he stared at where the castle would have been, then looked to the unicorn. “Huh. Wish you’d told me you could do that sooner.”

The unicorn stood up. Steve’s knees were covered in dirt—but apparently nothing clung to a unicorn. “It would have ended very poorly if Morgana had still had us under her full power.”

Tony winced, but forced himself up to his feet. “I guess I should thank you for coming back.”

“There was a matter of a debt...”

“So with Morgana gone, does this mean I get to learn your name?”

Her tail flicked from side to side. “I had one again briefly. I had only so much of my own magic to bring you back though. It seemed a petty thing to keep when it could be traded for a whole life.”

“I really don’t know what to say,” Tony said, walking over, and rubbing her nose affectionately. “Thanks doesn’t seem like nearly enough.”

“Nothing needs to be said between friends,” she replied, a twinkle in her eye. “It’s a big, wide world. If you were able to find and make a new name for yourself, I don’t see why it should be any different for me. Go home with your friends, and remember what you’ve learned.”

Steve held out his hand, intertwining Tony’s finger’s with his own. He held on tightly to Bethany’s hand too. “ _There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home…_ ”

Tony looked at him strangely. ‘That’s not a real spell.”

Bethany quirked an eyebrow. “What? Are you an expert on magic now?”

Tony smirked, even as the spell took hold and the landscape and time melted and blurred around them. “I’ll have you know that for a very brief period of time, I was a great and powerful wizard.”

* * *

 

Steve stood on the roof of Avengers mansion and pulled his watch out of his pocket to check the time. The faithful old Timex was too ratty to wear with the pressed suit he’d found hanging on his door that morning. Jarvis feigned ignorance, but the note pinned to it was Tony’s hand: _Up for a re-do? Meet me on the roof at 7._

Steve was curious to see who Tony would show as. If he wanted to take Steve out and about sans mask, then it would probably be Tony, not Iron Man. On the other hand, the roof hinted strongly that wherever they were headed, they were flying.

As if on cue, Steve spotted a shiny glint of inbound metal. Steve held a hand up to his eyes and squinted.

It definitely wasn’t the shape of the Iron Man armor—much too big for that. A few hundred yards out, Steve realized it was a car.

Tony—in a suit and tie that complemented Steve’s ensemble—set the flying automobile down gingerly on the roof’s helipad, then leaned over and pushed opened the passenger side door. Taking the hint, Steve climbed in.

“Momma used to say nice boys go inside and introduce themselves to the family first,” Steve teased.

Tony’s eyes were hidden behind dark sun-glasses, but from his tone of voice, Steve suspected he had rolled his eyes. “You look nice.”

“I’d hope so, I’m guessing you picked it out.”

Tony smirked.

 _Guilty_ , thought Steve.

“Nope, that was Jan’s doing. She insisted that if we’re out together on the pretense of SI needing a concept artist, that you’d better look like SI material.”

“Oh.” Steve tried to tamp down on the disappointment.

“Win-win, if you ask me. You don’t have to guess what’s going on under the face mask, and I don’t have to eat through a straw.”

* * *

 

As it turned out, heading out to dinner with Tony Stark had other perks, namely a table reserved in a corner, away from prying eyes and ears.

“I was actually going to do this the night that I stood you up,” Tony confessed over crudités. “I was getting ready to tell you who I was before the mess with Doom buying SI tech.”

“All cleaned up now?”

Tony grimaced. “All of the shipments that Zurrow arranged. The hard part is making sure it doesn’t happen again.”

“You know that if you need time, I can call in favors to cover the gap in the roster, right? It’s not that I don’t want you on the team,” Steve added quickly, sensitive that he was near old, sore ground. “I want you in the best possible shape that you can be, and if it means taking time away, that’s okay. That’s normal.”

To be honest, Steve wondered if it might not be healthy for _him_ to take a break from the Avengers too. Between the serum and the unicorn, he’d healed quickly from their medieval adventure, but the feelings that it had dug up for Tony was another beast entirely.

Tony stared down at his plate, then amazed Steve by what tumbled out of his mouth. “You know…I think I might.”

There was a lull in the conversation, both men absorbed privately with something that they weren’t ready to vent in the open air. It stretched awkwardly between them until Steve cleared his throat. “How is Bethany doing?”

“On some much deserved PTO. Sounds like she’s having fun. I got a postcard from Majorca the other day…what?”

He’d caught Steve out, trying to stifle a laugh. “Nothing, nothing. Just seems like you would have jumped at the chance to get away like that once. But I know better now.”

How many trips had Tony arranged for himself to take so that he didn’t have to juggle time in different suits? Steve’s guess was, _too many._ It was funny, especially if he ignored the flip side of how sad it was too.

Tony propped up his menu like a shield. “Crashing an ex’s vacation? No thank you.” He held up his pointer finger. “That’s a recipe for competing over who looks better in a swimsuit,” a second finger joined the first, “and who can pick up more flies at the tourist bars.” Tony’s face twisted as he realized who he was talking to. “Sorry. You’ve probably never _had_ competition in the swimsuit category.”

Steve felt his ears get hot. He took this as confirmation that nothing had rekindled between Tony and Bethany, though. He wasn’t sure if that was better or worse. In some ways, it would have been easier, finding out that Tony was seeing someone—that would have nailed Steve’s hopes tight inside a coffin.

“Say,” Tony’s eyes sparkled with mischief. “I don’t suppose you’d humor me on something?”

Steve bit his tongue to keep from saying, “ _anything,”_ and instead nodded.

“Did you have any guesses as to who it was under the armor?”

Steve grinned. That was easy. “Yes, many. Rhodey for one.”

Tony laughed. “On a few occasions, you wouldn’t have been wrong…”

* * *

 

Tony dropped Steve back at the mansion late. The clock in the car said _1:43 AM,_ and it was five minutes slow by Steve’s watch. Every moment of the night had been wonderful, recounting so many old adventures without any masks between them.

Well…no physical masks, anyway.

The one downside was Steve’s burgeoning sense of guilt. Here he was, having a great time with his best friend, the walls finally down, and he was still hiding how he felt. Worse—he’d kissed Tony now. It felt wrong—dirty even—like Steve had taken advantage of him.

“You staying at the mansion tonight?” Steve asked as Tony threw the car into park and pulled out the keys. They jingled as he tossed them from hand to hand and strode around the car, suit jacket tucked under one arm.

“Thinking about it. Iron Man’s bed is comfier than Tony’s. Go figure.”

Steve swallowed a lump in his throat at the thought of Tony wrapped up in bedsheets, especially Steve’s bedsheets, and felt the evening’s millionth stab of guilt pierce him, deep in the chest.

“Tony, I think there’s something else that I should tell you.”

Tony smiled up at him innocently, so full of good humor. Steve desperately hoped he wasn’t about to bring that all down around them.

“Bethany and I were having trouble waking you up. We didn’t get it right the first time…”

Tony stayed silent, quietly curious at where this was going.

Letting Steve dig his own grave, more like. _Hooboy, better get it over with quickly, Rogers._

“We, um, well…tried the cliché way to wake someone up first.”

“Oh? That must have been…awkward for Bethany.”

“We _both_ did.”

“Oh.” That was all he said, like maybe he hadn’t heard, or was waiting for an apology, or an explanation…

Steve began searching for the words to save himself some face, and found that he didn’t want to. He wanted a confessional for everything that he had kept bottled up. “I’m sorry if it makes things strange. I just…well, I thought that after everything we’d been through there might be a possibility that something had started between us. And I know how I feel…so it seemed like the right thing to try at the time, especially if it could bring you back.”

_You were dead, and it hurt so much. I would have done anything._

_“_ But now I feel guilty, because I kissed you, and you didn’t know…and it feels like I took advantage of the situation.” Once he’d opened the floodgate, he couldn’t stop.

He felt Tony’s fingers come up, stroking his arm. “It’s okay Steve, you were just trying to do the right thing.”

If anything, it made Steve feel even worse. “That’s just it. It wasn’t—I couldn’t.” There had been no way to keep a kiss simple when Steve felt the way he did. “I love you.”

Tony’s mouth dropped open. “For how long?”

“Since the start.” He felt like he was ripping his heart out, and laying it on display for the shocked man in front of him. “When I came out of the ice and first laid eyes on you.” There. He’d made such a mess of this. It seemed neither of them was particularly good at apologizing for keeping secrets. “I’m sorry.”

He turned to go, and felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Steve, wait, I had no idea. You’ve got to believe that.”

Tony urged him to turn back and face him, and when Steve did, Tony threw his arms around Steve’s neck, drawing him into a kiss, warm and passionate.

“You have no idea how happy that makes me,” Tony whispered, lips hovering just inches from Steve’s—keeping him close. He kissed Steve again fervently. “I’ve loved you since the day you moved into this place.”

Steve’s arms encircled Tony’s waist, and he pushed Tony back, up against the car. He felt vaguely bad about that. “Your suit’s gonna get ruined.”

“You’re welcome to try,” Tony smirked, and Steve’s blood raged hot in his veins.

“You don’t want to…talk about…this first?” He managed to get out, around the nips Tony made with his teeth on his lips.

“What’s there to say that we haven’t already, old friend?” Tony asked, already threading his fingers into the knotted tie at Steve’s throat and pulling it off.

He supposed that Tony had a point there…

“Guess you will be staying the night after all, huh?”

“Yeah. Come share my comfy bed tonight?”

“You bet.”

* * *

 

Steve laid him down reverently, there was no other word for it. It was intoxicating, and it also scared Tony, seeing his dark reflection in Steve’s bright eyes, suspended there as a singularity in Steve’s universe.

He and Steve had made love very differently in the past, he decided, as the other man began undoing the buttons of his shirt. Tony wriggled until Steve let up, cooperating begrudgingly as Tony flipped them over to straddle Steve’s hips.

The revelation about their bed habits was not exactly surprising, given that they were in the mid thirties. Still, if someone had told Tony that the two of them would go on an adventure where one of them was working with a beautiful redhead, and the other befriended a _unicorn,_ stereotypes being what they were, Tony would have pinned the saintly virgin tag on Steve.

Steve rubbed Tony through his already much tented trousers, stroking the head of Tony’s cock with the pad of his thumb, and Tony promptly discarded the thought. There was nothing virginal about the man under him. He was wicked, and he knew exactly what he was doing.

“You want top or bottom?” Tony asked through grit teeth. His fingers dug into the pillow on either side of Steve’s tousled blond hair.

Steve’s hands slid up his thighs, snaking around and palming the curve of Tony’s ass. “Hmm…top.”

“Music to my ears.”

Steve grinned up at him, pulled Tony down for a brief kiss, and started tugging at the waistband of his pants.

More out of instinct than conscious thought, Tony’s hands moved to his fly.

“You made me a challenge earlier,” Steve murmured, deliciously throaty, as he caught Tony’s wrist.

Oh yes. Steve was wicked, through and through. Tony deliberately twisted himself out of Steve’s grip, and because Steve wasn’t playing for keeps, it was easy.

Well, Tony could be evil too. He placed his hands on his hips, his dress shirt hanging loose around him. “So far, you’re losing.”

Steve’s eyes got dark and possessive.

In hindsight, Tony’s pants never really stood a chance.

* * *

 

Steve worked one end of Tony open with his fingers, the other with his tongue. He was hard and rubbing up against Tony’s thigh, but had refused to indulge himself in any other way yet. He was too wrapped up in exploring every inch of Tony’s body.

How long had he waited for this? _Too long_ —dreaming in silence, hoping to one day pull away each piece of the armor and discover the man beneath.

Tony shifted beneath him, tilting his hips up as Steve’s fingers pressed deeper inside of him. “Oh, fuck, Steve,” he turned his face into Steve’s neck, his breath hot against Steve’s skin. “Fuck, that feels good.”

Steve smiled, memorizing the sight of Tony spread out on the bed, his cock bobbing with excitement as Steve plied him with slippery fingers. Experimentally, he crooked his middle finger, and reveled in Tony’s gasp.

“Still good?”

“Better than good.”

Steve ran a thumb over Tony’s flushed cheek and kissed him again. Then he slid down to lavish attention on Tony’s straining cock, wrapping his tongue around the head, and sliding the smooth skin between his lips. One hand still busy questing into Tony, Steve wrapped the other around Tony’s shaft, humming with pleasure as Tony forgot himself. His knees came up around Steve’s shoulders as his body curled in ecstasy.

* * *

 

Tony threw his head back into the pillow, neck arched and exposed. He let out a small throaty noise as Steve took him deeper in his mouth.

Sheer willpower was the only thing that kept him from thrusting up into Steve’s mouth. Steve liked it maddeningly slow, and Tony felt like the tide, waxing and waning, coming so close to release, only for Steve to back off, leaving him wanting more, aching for completion.

He loved it—what Steve was doing with his tongue, but also the intimacy of the act, nothing left between them but skin.

Steve brought him to the brink once more—Tony was so close— before sitting back on his knees and wiping his lips. He had an extremely self-satisfied look in his eyes as he looked down at Tony’s flushed body, his own cock hanging hard and ready between his legs. Then he reached for a bottle, stroked himself to slick his cock, and Tony understood for the first time the full weight of what it meant to be under somebody’s spell.

“Turn over, Tony.”

“Thought you’d never ask.”

“Some of us are patient.”

Tony bit back a reply, burying his face in a pillow to stifle a moan as Steve sank his cock inside him.

“Oh, god,” Steve said, rolling his hips gently, testing the waters. “You’re tight.”

Tony pushed back against him, relishing the sensation of being filled. An itch deep inside him quieted with Steve between his legs. His breath hitched as Steve began to rock them back and forth, plunging himself into Tony’s body in earnest now.

* * *

Tony moaned his name, and Steve nearly lost his self-control, his breathing coming ragged.

Then Tony pressed his cheek into the pillow, canted his hips upward, and took himself in hand. His lower lip was clenched between his teeth.

Steve stilled briefly, adjusting his angle to envelop Tony. He pressed a kiss to the hard, knotted muscles of Tony’s back, and slid his hand beneath the other man, his hand curling around Tony’s, joining in the languid strokes.

“Oh fuck, Steve, _Steve,”_ Tony gasped, jerking and spilling messily all over their fingers.

Steve wasn’t far behind.

He rested his face against Tony’s back and gave his lower body free reign, exalting in the way Tony’s orgasm pulled at Steve’s cock and left Tony even tighter.

He came, buried deep inside Tony, wave after wave pulled from him till Tony’s spasming muscles had milked his cock dry. His voice was a sigh as he rode it out, wrapping his arm’s around Tony’s chest. “Oh, _Tony_.”

He felt warm all over, pleasantly spent.

Tony wriggled in his arms, turning to give Steve a kiss.

Steve decided he’d never been happier.

* * *

 

Tony watched Steve doze off, amused by the dopey grin on his face, which lingered long after Steve had fallen asleep.

He hadn’t felt like this since he’d first built an Iron Man suit stateside.

He felt light and carefree, lying in bed next to him—like the world beyond the door had stopped, leaving them to have each other. Tony would have thought that with their luck, something would interrupt.

He shifted, felt something hard in the bed, and fished out Steve’s ratty old watch. _Must have fallen out during disrobing,_ Tony thought. To say the process had been frenetic would have been conservative.

He frowned as he looked at the time, the second hand ticking away dutifully toward 1:45 in the morning.

That couldn’t be right. Steve had teased him for what felt like the better part of an hour.

And then Tony thought of the way Steve had breathed his name in his ear, the way it had made him shudder.

 _Well it’s_ a _name,_ the unicorn had said. _That doesn’t mean it holds much power._ _They rarely do unless they_ mean _something to the holder._

Tony smiled, curled up next to Steve, and listened to his heavy sighs of sleep.

Something ineffable inside Tony told him that the unicorn was still out there, somewhere.

He wondered what she was called now.


End file.
